School battles in Rockford and Baton Rouge show the difficulty of ending racial injustice

Brown Vs. Board Of Education: 50 Years Later

Wells said he knew exactly why the burden of desegregation fell exclusively on black children, who represented about 20 percent of enrollment in the late '70s. White resistance to busing was fierce, and community leaders counted on black students to drop out and work in Rockford's factories, which were cranking out machine tools and auto parts three shifts a day.

"We knew it was wrong, but we thought better times [for race relations] were coming," Wells said.

Better times didn't come.

By 1989, the bottom had fallen out of the manufacturing industry, school enrollment was shrinking and the schools were running out of money.

The superintendent announced a grim restructuring plan to erase a $7 million deficit: The district would close 10 schools, six on the west side, including the city's only naturally integrated high school, West High. Two integrated middle schools would be converted to elementary "megaschools," with one holding a projected 1,227 3rd to 6th graders. The plan would have put more than 1,800 black and Latino students--more than half of the non-Asian minorities in the district--into a segregated complex of feeder schools and "megaschools."

At the time, Wells had returned to his hometown with a master's degree from Cornell University and owned a small construction business.

He was a single man with an income that relied on the largess of the town's white power structure.

Yet for Wells, this move was too racist to ignore. He organized a diverse group of parents called People Who Care, which filed a lawsuit to block the plan. The district made some concessions, but not enough to please some parents, the Chicago civil rights lawyers working on the case and a federal judge. The case became a class-action desegregation case, and proceeded to trial in 1993.

In 1996, Mahoney executed a massive restructuring order that gave control of the schools to a federal "master" with a blank check to integrate the schools and reverse the decades of neglect.

The plan ordered $80 million of construction, three new west-side schools and renovations at others on both sides of the river. A complex busing system called "controlled choice" pushed thousands of children out of their neighborhood schools. The district dropped academic tracking programs and hired more black and Latino teachers.

The money for the measures largely came from the district's "tort" fund, which schools use to pay legal fees and is not limited by tax cap restrictions. At the height of the case, Rockford had the third-highest property taxes in the nation in proportion to home value. Attorneys' fees alone topped $20 million.

District left wounded

In the end, taxpayers revolted and an appellate judge dismissed the case in 2002, arguing the decree had done its job. In one sense it had. Rockford schools are about as integrated as they could get, and no single school is dominated by one race.

But the district also suffered great losses. The school system lost almost 12,000 students. The percentage of low-income children tripled in a decade. And the district is facing a $28 million deficit next school year.

Meanwhile, minority achievement still lags, with the passing rate on state reading tests twice as high for whites as for black students across all grades--about 60 percent passing versus 30 percent.

A national study ranked Rockford as having one of the worst dropout rates for black males--with only 38 percent graduating from high school. Half of the district's 40 schools are on the state's academic watch or academic warning lists.

"There was racial discrimination here ... and the positive thing about this case was that it made people aware," said former school board member Ted Biondo. "But the money didn't help. Educationally, it failed miserably."

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Key events in public school desegregation

1931: Roberto Alvarez vs. Lemon Grove

In the first successful desegregation case in the U.S., the court allows Mexican-American students to return to the Lemon Grove schoolhouse near San Diego

1947: Mendez vs. Westminster School District

The U.S. Court of Appeals rules that four school districts in Orange County, Calif., cannot put Mexican-American children in separate schools.

1949

With the NAACP's support, Harry Briggs and 19 other plaintiffs file a class-action lawsuit against the Clarendon County School Board in South Carolina. Briggs vs. Elliott was the first of five cases later consolidated into Brown vs. Board of Education.

1954: In Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., the

Supreme Court rules that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional.

Linda Brown Smith was a 3rd grader when her father, Oliver Brown, started the class-action suit in 1951.

1957

Acting on orders from Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus, National Guardsmen stop black students in Little Rock as they attempt to enter an all-white high school.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower later orders National Guardsmen to escort nine black students to an all-white high school.